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BackgroundEducators continue to search for better strategies for medical education. Although the unifying theme of reforms was “increasing interest in, attention to, and understanding of the knowledge base structures”, it is difficult to achieve all these aspects via a single type of instruction.MethodsWe used related key words to search in Google Scholar and Pubmed. Related search results on this topic were selected for discussion.ResultsDespite the range of different methods used in medical education, students are still required to memorize much of what they are taught, especially for the basic sciences. Subjects like anatomy and pathology carry a high intrinsic cognitive load mainly because of the large volume of information that must be retained. For these subjects, decreasing cognitive load is not feasible and memorizing appears to be the only strategy, yet the cognitive load makes learning a challenge for many students. Cognitive load is further increased when inappropriate use of educational methods occurs, e.g., in problem based learning which demands clinical reasoning, a high level and complex cognitive skill. It is widely known that experts are more skilled at clinical reasoning than novices because of their accumulated experiences. These experiences are based on the formation of cognitive schemata. In this paper we describe the use of cognitive schemata, developed by experts as worked examples to facilitate medical students’ learning and to promote their clinical reasoning.ConclusionWe suggest that cognitive load theory can provide a useful framework for understanding the challenges and successes associated with education of medical professionals.

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A significant geologic event occurred on the Oligocene/Miocene boundary at 23.8 Ma in the northern South China Sea, which is named the Baiyun (白云) movement in this article. This event strongly affected not only the South China Sea, but also East Asia. After the Baiyun event, the ridge of seafloor spreading of the South China Sea jumped southward and rotated counterclockwise, and a strong subsidence occurred in the Baiyun sag of the Pearl River Mouth basin. The shelf break shifted suddenly from the south to the north of the Baiyun sag, and the deposition environment in this sag changed from continental shelf with neritic deposition to continental slope with deep-water deposition. Sediment geochemistry study indicated that the Baiyun event played a key role in the rapid change of sediment provenance for the Pearl River Mouth basin. Between 32 and 23.8 Ma, the source of sediments was mainly from the granites in South China, while after 23.8 Ma some sediments might have come from the eastern Himalaya, as the Pearl River drainage extended westward after the uplift of Tibet since that time. The Baiyun event led to a great change in the drainage framework of the paleoPearl River, sediment types and the depositional environments in the Pearl River Mouth basin, and relative sea level of the northern South China Sea, as well as sedimentation and hydrocarbon accumulation in the area.

The current study provides no evidence that a dietary reduction of the n-6:n-3 LCPUFA ratio in the maternal diet during pregnancy and lactation is a useful early preventive strategy against obesity at preschool age. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT00362089.